Note value confusion (with MIDI)

[klackt]

Hey,

I don't know if that was a suitable subject title..

Anyway, I've been learning about music theory right from the start, I'm sure I understand that quarter notes is one beat of the measure (in 4/4) and then 8th notes divide that even further, and 16th and so on - so I know what they look like in sheet music as well as MIDI.

But what I'm confused is, especially with 16th notes is that what if I don't want an entire four 16th note on the beat, what if I just want ONE out of the whole beat like this:




What would that be in music notation? What's throwing me off is that when I convert it to sheet muic it's come out with a double 8th note, but both notes don't stretch to 1/8 - but when I do change the grid to 1/8 I have to stretch both midi notes out to fill in the 8th and it just gives me the same result.

It's the same if I change the grid to 1/32 and just fil in one note of the 1/32 split (if that makes sense?)

Is there something I'm missing here? Or is it just the notation software?



How would the above be shown in traditional music notation?

Thanks! If I've done or said something really stupid - I'm sorry.

[C00kie]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staccato#Notation
or fill the remainder with rests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest_%29music%29

[Gamma-UT]

Assuming I've read this correctly, what's going on is down to the way the notation package interprets MIDI. The software will tend to assume that the music is to be played by a human - and will need some gaps between notes to let fingers/keys/picks move around. So the software will tend to 'round up' note values. As your notes fill out an entire 16th note gap, the software will tend to assume that these are staccato 8th notes (assuming it's smart enough to fill in the staccato notation) rather than a 16th followed by a 16th rest followed by another 16th. My guess is that if you shorten the notes slightly, you will get the result you expected.

Logic, for example, has interpretation settings you can control so that it will also quantise notes to a beat when displaying them, but will not change the actual MIDI timing.

Your second example I would, at a guess, come out as an 8th note, 16th rest, 8th note, 8th rest, 8th note.

[Nystul]

This isn't cut and dry because of the way that real musicians articulate notes. There are a lot of different possibilities depending on the instrument and the style of the music. In a literal and explicit sense, you can write a sixteenth note followed by a sixteenth rest. In certain styles of music you could just write an eighth note and it would be played approximately this way by default. In other cases it might be appropriate to write eighth notes with staccato, or portato, or even some form of accent articulation. If you are writing for a snare drum it doesn't matter how you write it because the player won't be controlling how fast the note is damped (it's always going to be short).

Converting from MIDI to score is a bit of an inexact science, in part because music notation is such an inconsistent language to begin with. And in part because the MIDI data doesn't tell the whole story to begin with.

[klackt]

Gah! I knew it..thought I was going a bit crazy there for a sec, thanks guys...

[jancivil]

musical notation of rhythm and durations is a pretty imprecise description of what happens. a viable score from finale or sibelius etc imported to your DAW as a .mid is going to be pretty robotic, and a midi 'performance' that's viable as musical expression like somebody played it is going to be a total mess going the other way with it. one is going to have to hard-quantize it, for starters make sure there are no overlaps per bars, you have to conform bests to bars or vice versa. I would conform bars to what happens in the music; here you find that a steady beat might have many (practically imperceptible) changes in the timeline, though and that can be unwieldy to read.

working with midi in the latter scenario, to achieve the illusion of a performance is IMO best approached not worrying about notation. If one begins with notation, there is going to be a lot of work left to do; if one is comfortable with that workflow, that's that... but here there is a middleman of naming in between the idea and the execution.

Real music gets ahead of and slacks off the time in so many ways, anyway. & the durations you read aren't usually going to be very precise instructions of the intention, or it would tend to be unwieldy to read.